In its 1990s heyday, the Icehouse was the epicenter of Phoenix rave culture. Legendary parties lasted all night long within the walls of this cavernous downtown space, making it a natural anchor of the art and music communities. Then, as the times changed, so did the nightlife, and the Icehouse seemed to fall off the local radar. It continued to host events, but only sporadically. Most nights of the month, the grand building loomed large and silent on a dark stretch of Jackson Street.

But lately we've noticed that the Icehouse is reasserting itself as a place to see and be seen. Not with old-school raves, exactly, but with the sort of over-the-top multimedia events -- live bands, DJs, fashion shows and art installations -- that Phoenicians adore, including the now-annual LIFE Festival, an alternative Fourth of July celebration of "Liberty, Independence, and Freedom of Expression." Welcome to the new Ice Age.

Like the Phoenix art scene in general, Art Detour -- that spring weekend where most every gallery in town opens its doors to the masses -- is a mixed bag. Some good, some bad. Some very, very bad. We had a favorite spot this year, partly because the art was so good, but even more because the vibe was so great. Held at the downtown Phoenix home of an unnamed but well-known member of the local arts community whose initials happen to be G.S., Garage S. was billed as a traditional garage sale. And it hit the mark, with all the things we love about garage sales, starting with really amazing bargains.

We couldn't believe our luck -- we scored Jon Haddock sketches and a portrait by Sue Chenoweth, painted on the spot. We drooled over bags by Sherrie Medina and Carrie Bloomston; Heidi Hesse and Colin Chillag both had work for sale. There was even a garage band, the Haystacks, and someone had the great idea of trucking in some fake snow. We ran into all kinds of people we knew, and gobbled an ice pop as it rolled down our arm.

The best part was, for that one weekend, Garage S. made our big city feel like a small town.

Everyone we know who attended Catholic school or had to endure catechism class has horror stories to tell about the nasty nuns. But these same people have been screaming with glee over Patti Hannon, who plays Sister, the ball-busting bride of Christ charged with our ecumenical upkeep in Late Nite Catechism Parts I and II. Both plays are written by Maripat Donovan and directed by Marc Silvia, and are running concurrently at Scottsdale Center for the Arts, where the audience pretends to be students of Hannon, who paces the stage, swinging her beads and cracking wise about Christ and his cronies. She's a master at improvisational comedy, which is the hallmark of this frequently hilarious homage to holiness. And that's a good thing, since Late Nite II is really just a prolonged improv sketch, one in which Hannon must lob funny answers to any number of questions posed by the audience. No matter how silly or stupid the question, Hannon is always ready with an answer both amusing and instructive. Late Nite II is irreverent but not irreligious, and always funny, thanks to Hannon's litany of one-liners about good and evil.

Bless you, Patti Hannon, for knowing your way around a sepulcher, and for making us laugh at stuff that used to bug us.

By now, we're accustomed to complex, compelling entertainment from this tireless troupe. But Nearly Naked's take on Joe Calarco's smart, sexy Shakespeare's R & J was more than fun to watch -- it made us want to go home and read Twelfth Night. Fortunately for us, an intimate relationship with the Bard wasn't necessary to grasp the genius of Calarco's script -- thanks to director Damon Dering's talent for drawing subtle parallels between tormented youth and the kids in Romeo and Juliet, the ultimate story of adolescent tragedy. Dering's gifted cast nailed the angst of Catholic school youths stifled by the repressive regime of a Catholic boarding school, who meet to read aloud from a banned copy of Romeo and Juliet. The spartan set and wonderfully low-tech sound design, executed live by a chorus that created the sounds of wind and heartbeat with just their lungs and their teeth, set the stage for one of last season's very best productions.

When the nice folks at Desert Stages remounted their rip-snorting production of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret last December, it was a holiday gift to all of us who couldn't get tickets to the show's original sold-out run the summer before. The glory of this particular production is that this perennial musical is usually mauled by college theater troupes and small, earnest companies like Desert Stages -- the familiar score is best served by big voices, and Joe Masteroff's wicked translation of Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories needs a wider acting talent than is usually found among amateur thespians. Which is what made Desert Stages' superb staging all the more impressive. Songs like "Money" and "Don't Tell Mama" benefited from exactly the kind of rough talent that director/choreographers Gerry and Laurie Cullit cast here -- the very sort of talent one would have found at the Kit Kat Klub. The excellent, stripped-down staging crammed the show onto catwalks and into stairwells, transforming the troupe's smallish black box (they've since moved to bigger, tonier digs) into a seamy nightclub where musical numbers began in the flies and slithered onto a cramped, dirty stage. We're still crowing about this one, which made us want to "come to the cabaret, old chum" again and again.

With its debut in January, TheatreScape whetted our appetite for more and better community theater productions. The tiny company bowed with Lee Blessing's Eleemosynary, a story of three women -- a mother, her daughter, and her granddaughter the spelling bee champ -- for whom love and resentment are indistinguishable. Blessing's nonlinear tale is a tough one to tell; it's a stylish, witty play as challenging as a good word game. Its lighthearted narrative is crammed with sadness and loss; it asks us to root for some pretty pitiless people; its main storytelling technique is avoidance. Yet Patrick Du Laney's skillful, intuitive direction and pitch-perfect cast made sense of these complicated women and their less-than-perfect lives. And when tiny Michelle Chin, her eyes filled with tears, crossed the stage during her curtain call to retrieve the paper wings that are her character's prized possession, there was hardly a dry eye in the house.

It was tiny details like this -- the wide purple wing sketched onto the set's cubist triptych; the tears welling in Lauren Bahlman's eyes when she confronted her daughter; the wonderful musical bit enacted by Barbara McGrath -- that made this Eleemosynary so gratifying. The result was a sad story told with a generosity of spirit, and an impressive debut from a troupe whose new season we look forward to.

Until recently, the Urban Styles Dance Studio at Tempe's Mill Towne Center was the place to see and be schooled in popping and locking, breaking and capoeira from the Valley's best-known b-boys and girls. Regrettably, the studio closed over the summer because of a lack of support. "Break-dancing's not a studio thing here," laments former manager Hutton Peck. "It's more underground."

To find break-dancing in Phoenix now, Peck suggests hooking up with one of the Valley's premier crews, whose members teach the skills in order to fund their own. Furious Stylez Crew, led by b-boy community leader House, holds break-dancing classes at different studios, like Destiny Dance and Plum, several nights a week -- but locations change regularly. On the west side, Footklan conducts break-dancing lessons Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at Khalid's Martial Arts studio. Call House at Furious Stylez or Derrick at Footklan for information on where the Valley's hottest crews are throwing down any given week.

Much has been said about downtown Phoenix's growing art scene, and film isn't always included in the discussion. But lots of galleries are finding the wall space for screenings, and the granddaddy of them all is No Festival Required. It's become an important presence in the past few years, morphing from an occasional showcase of independent film and video shorts to a regular monthly happening at Modified Arts. Here, both local and national filmmakers show comedy, drama, documentary and experimental works -- everything from the weird to the sublime, with no worries over commercial viability. That's quite a feat in this world of megaplexes. Even folks at the Phoenix Art Museum were impressed -- this past year, they welcomed No Festival Required into Whiteman Hall for special showings, exposing it to a whole new audience.

Letter writing is all but dead, thanks to e-mail, and we worry about the fate of Hallmark. Don't tell that to Cyndi Coon, who is on the verge of a smashing success with laboratory5, her line of greeting cards and note cards. The Phoenix artist is truly inspired; her cards are whimsical, funny and absolutely frameable. She has a way with felt and, oh, what this woman can do with rickrack. We are particularly fond of Coon's birthday cake cards, and you have to see her rendition of the tooth fairy. Dailycandy.com -- the NYC-based arbiter of all things cool -- recently anointed laboratory5.com, so get 'em now. Coon's cards are surely going fast. She might just single-handedly save the art of the letter.

They don't carry the ectoplasm-seeking nutrona wands and proton packs of Aykroyd, Murray and company, but Joe and Mikki Shelton of Arizona Trips n Tours and their ever-shifting team of investigators, aspiring parapsychologists, acceleration physicists and just plain ghost nuts are "who you gonna call" once you've heard a few too many spooky bumps in the night.

Eschewing a flashy Ectomobile in favor of a caravan of compacts and beat-up pickups, the members of Arizona Paranormal Investigations crew set out on monthly expeditions to the state's most notorious ghost towns, like Tombstone and Jerome, as well as a few not-so-obvious spots around the Valley -- one forum member is convinced the old Spaghetti Factory building on Central Avenue in Phoenix is haunted by the ghost of a little girl in the attic. The best excursions, though, are the ones the API crew must conduct undercover. Founder Gary Westerlund, who turned the organization over to the Sheltons in July, insists there's an old hotel in Glendale that's now haunted by the ghosts of dead prostitutes and johns from the days when the hotel was a wild Western brothel. Current management, however, would rather the hotel be noted in Fodor's for its air-cooled suites and kitchenettes. When the API crew shows up with its infrared cameras, low-frequency sound recording equipment and electromagnetic field detectors, the "no vacancy" sign goes up -- and true ghostbusting adventure ensues.